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This is why we can't have nice things. (lemmy.world)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/arduinos-new-terms-of-service-worries-hobbyists-ahead-of-qualcomm-acquisition/

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[–] 57 points 8 months ago (5 children)

Arduino has been irrelevant for a while. There are better alternatives for everything they offer. For a start, take a look at Raspberry Pi’s microcontrollers.

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  • [–] 26 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Up next: Raspberry foundation enshitification.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    The closest they've come so far is prioritizing industrial customers and compute modules for a while during a chip shortage, to my memory. Hopefully they stick to their roots in the hobbyist/educational sector.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago

    To be fair, if most of your funding (source needed) comes from industrial customers, not supplying them is a good way to lose their patronage.

    So even if it sucked for hobbyists at that moment, keeping a big player like RbP viable for the long term might not be too bad of a tradeoff.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    ST looming in the background, NXP desperately trying to smash their own kneecaps with a hammer and failing. ESP getting hit with a lightning bolt every time they try to read documentation they printed out but not when its digital...

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  • [–] 16 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I stay away from all the micro tech drama and I feel like two years ago, that community was bitching that raspberry pi sold out and everyone should switch to arduino.

    I don't have a side. I just pick whatever is easiest to make a emulation station.

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  • [–] 16 points 8 months ago* (2 children)

    RbP created a publicly traded company for their hardware, which is almost-wholly-held by Raspberry Pi Foundation, which is a charity.

    That sort of thing ought not be allowed, ever. It’s similar to the path Arduino took to get here. There are still other competitors, but for the time being I’m happy enough with RbPi’s dirt-cheap microcontrollers. Their mini-PCs are a different story. We’re already seeing enshittification and price gouging there. It’s just a matter of time.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    Yeah, I remember when the prices were high for a raspberry pi, I think it was $45, I went on Newegg and found a full size motherboard for $50. I mean, if you are looking for small that's no good, but if cheap was all you were going for at that time, the pi wasn't that great.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago

    You can also use the Arduino hardware without their IDE or libraries. You just need avr-gcc, avr-libc and a makefile. The AVR microcontrollers are very easy to program. The Arduino libraries really just get in the way once you need to do anything with timers.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    True, but you can't just port arduino code to python or whatever language the raspberry picos compile from. An arduino project would have to be completely rewritten, as far as I'm aware.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    you can program a Pi Pico with the Arduino IDE in C++. Some projects will just compile if you aren't using some AVR specific features like the built-in EEPROM that the RP2040 doesn't have.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 child)

    the Arduino IDE in C++

    That's actually pretty cool, but aren't the majority of Arduino projects written in Arduino (Java superset)? At least all of mine are, as that is how I was originally taught to program it.

    edit - Please don't downvote people for seeking information. There was nothing disingenuous or underhanded about my comment, you're either downvoting because you dislike people asking questions or don't like something personal about my experience, which harms this community directly and also make the site feel unnecessarily hostile. This isn't reddit.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    TL;DR: The Arduino language is C++ with an automatically included library, but it's descended from a Java project with an automatically included library.

    Processing is a graphics and art based graphics library/IDE that uses the Java programming language. It basically includes some classes and methods by default on top of Java that makes programming graphics and even simple games a bit more straightforward.

    Processing's IDE was forked by the Wiring project for the purposes of microcontroller hardware programming. Because the Java Virtual Machine is a bit much to ask a 16MHz 8-bit AVR to run, they switched the language to C++ which compiles straight to machine code that runs on the bare metal. Again, it's just C++ with a library included, under the hood it uses gcc to compile and avrdude to program the chip. I believe the IDE itself is still written in Java.

    Arduino took Wiring and painted it teal. They've extended it quite a bit since then but in the early days Arduino was really a hardware project. They've since added support for non-AVR boards to the Arduino IDE, including ARM-Cortex and ESP32 based boards.

    Raspberry Pi offers C and C++ SDKs and a MicroPython interpreter for the Pico series. Someone contributed support for RP2040 based boards to the Arduino IDE; I don't believe that was done officially by either RPi or Arduino.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    You can get an arduino clone for a lot cheaper than you can get an rpi clone.

    Sometimes, you just need something very simple and a cheap arduino is the right choice.

    Arduino is also a lot more user friendly for newcomers.

    It's a shame that Qualcomm will be the end of it.

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